Taking a stab at everything you hold dear

When did allergies become cool? Living in fear of the phrase “May contain traces of peanuts” doesn’t sound very cool.

Gluten free (GF), organic, and non-GMO all have their own devoted fanatics. But what relevance do they really have on health and life outcomes? Usually not very much, other than to make us feel better than the in-organic slobs who drive a McMuffin down their face every morning.

Free gluten? I’ll take it!

Let’s start with gluten. Poor gluten. Everyone should just bloody lay off it. Gluten is like that kid who arrives at school one morning to find suddenly everyone thinks he’s a loser, just because the cool kids decided so. Gluten never did anything to anyone, but everyone else is throwing rocks at him, so you do too.

But unless you are a coeliac and have a legitimate allergy, GF food is NOT better for you. There is absolutely no tangible, scientific proof that reducing gluten in a diet leads to any significant health outcomes. If it’s carbohydrates that are to blame for the overweight, lethargic mess you have become then avoiding bread might do you some good, but it’s not the gluten. As Katheryn Tallmadge (2013) puts it, you may feel better and lose weight from a GF diet, “But that outcome is more likely because [you’ve] cut out the excess calories found in many flour-based snack foods, and mistakenly attribute feeling better to taking out the gluten”.

Unfortunately, most self-diagnosed coeliacs won’t radically alter their diet when they go GF; instead they will, for convenience sake, simply replace gluten based products with the plethora of GF replicas that have exploded onto the market in the past few years. That is, instead of buying some fucking vegetables from coles and spending 15 minutes preparing them like a normal fucking person, they just pay an extra $2 on their dominos order for the GF option, so they can continue to ram the same shit down their face, while licking the grease from their fingers as they sit and lambast the fatties on The Biggest loser for not making the same positive life choices.

In almost all cases a GF diet is actually worse for you, especially if you still insist on eating the things you love, with the Gluten removed (i.e. GF pizza, GF bread, GF pasta). Gluten is a protein which binds food together, giving bread and wheat-based products their elasticity. When food manufacturers remove gluten, they need to find some other binding agent (like sugar or trans-fats) to bind the food. Needless to say, the gluten is probably better for you (unless of course you are actually a coeliac).

There is a large body of evidence showing that organic food does not have more nutrients or vitamins – it simply means that nothing inorganic has been used in the process. This, one assumes, means absolutely no fertilizers, and no pesticides. No brainer, right? But depending on where you are in the world, and what your government’s stance on food safety is, it’s likely that it does have some chemicals, but that the body governing Organic certification have said that these particular ones are OK. In Victoria, for instance, “Certain naturally occurring pesticides, including pyrethrins, light oils, copper and sulphur, and biological substances such as Bacillus thuringiensis, are permitted for use in organic farming” (2012, VicHealth). Sulphur and copper, by the way, go great with steamed broccolini.

All that aside, the fad has reached such an absurd level, that now not only can you pay double for organic food, which may have some positive effect on your health, you can also pay extra for organic cotton clothing, which is possibly healthier, but not nearly as delicious as polyester.

Do you know what’s in your food? Probably a fetus

GM-OH!

We all fear what we don’t understand. It’s a natural, ugly, depressing part of human psychology. I don’t understand the Russians and they scare the shit out of me. But this is an explanation, not an excuse, for blatant ignorance. You happened to read (half of) the article about Monsanto’s GMOs and now your mind is made up. GMOs, bad. Organic, good! A bit like calling Angela Merkel a nazi, because, well, she’s a German chancellor, right.. and, you know, HITLER.

Some forms of Genetic Modification, such as limiting the fertility of their GMO crops, are undeniably bad for farmers and do not help in the fight against global poverty and hunger. The Galactic Empire of the Sith Monsanto, for example has created a strain of GMOs which cannot be re-planted, effectively meaning that farmers were required to repurchase their seed stock from Monsanto every season. This is a practise which, you have to admit, kind of spits in the face of our 8,000-year history of agriculture, and is probably not designed to increase agricultural output, just Monsanto’s profits. These types of modifications, which instead of helping to build global agricultural output actually hamper it, are undeniably bad, but should not be confused with the thousand of other GMOs which do help to increase output. You just don’t hear about them, because the good GMOs – such as disease resistant Papaya and drought resistant rice – are good news, and that shit just doesn’t sell newspapers.

While the modern obsession with health and wellbeing is a positive step away from the consumerist fast-food horror show that has led to lifestyle diseases becoming the biggest cause of death in Australia, it is being hijacked by hyperbole and misinformation. With one in eight people on the planet suffering from malnutrition, it seems just a little self-indulgent to, with absolutely no scientific justification, reject foods and food production techniques which have the potential to drastically increase agricultural output and thus help alleviate world hunger. If we can keep the discourse rational and base discussions on evidence, not anecdotes, we can offset the potential risks of GMOs and oversee the largest single advancement in our eight-thousand-year history of agriculture. No biggy.

Personal faith can be an amazingly powerful thing; it can help someone come to grips with the loss of a loved one and it can bring about great changes in people who may have otherwise been lost. For these and many other reasons, personal faith and spirituality can be, and often are, beneficial to humanity. This faith can take many forms, and in almost every case it allows humans to transcend emotional and mental gulfs which they might otherwise have fallen into. Just as we as humans crave social, mental and physical fulfillment, there is an undeniable urge in all humans for spiritual fulfillment as well. We all want to believe in something.

Spirituality can take many forms. It can be mysticism (by which I mean religion), or it could be the belief in a defined set of principles and laws which govern the universe (by which I mean science). In either case, one’s set of beliefs brings comfort because it allows us to better explain the world around us. Whether you believe in a branch of mysticism, or in the scientific establishment, you are inevitably at some stage asked to believe in something which physically we cannot experience as humans and that therefore lays, for us blue-collar proletariat at least, purely in the realm of theory. In Christianity you are asked to believe things which we know in this era to be impossible; that a child of god can walk on water, turn water into goon, heal the sick and preach universal love all while hating on the gays. But science, too, asks us to believe something which, without the justification of the millions of hours of combined scientific research undertaken since the beginning of the modern scientific era, would also seem absurd; for instance, that when you rap your knuckle against a solid wooden table, your hand is hitting mainly empty space. It goes against one’s instinctual logic to believe that solid is not really solid, but by believing in the scientific process and trusting the scientific establishment at large, we can overcome this logical conflict.

Whatever form faith takes, at the personal level, it is an overwhelmingly good thing. It is when an organized hierarchy is formed to mobilize faith that the nasty bits; wars, famine, genocide, start to crop up.

Monopoly on morality

For millennia, organized religion has had a ‘monopoly on morality’, where a break with religion has been irrevocably linked with a break from morality. The idea that ordinary people could lead a just, loving and moral existence without acknowledging the existence of (and paying a tithe to) an ever-watchful deity was, when not dismissed as absurd, considered dangerous and corrosive to social stability.

It’s perhaps a shame that reforming, say, a drunk or violent person is still very much a spiritual endeavor, and the turning point of a person’s own reformation is often described as the very moment they ‘found god’. The grassroots nature of religious gatherings and the welcoming, open-arms approach are what make it such an effective tool for reforming such a person; a person who has been cut off from companionship and human interaction for so long, and suddenly finds themselves welcomed unequivocally into a tight-knit, supportive community in a local church or parish. The themes of repentance, forgiveness and acceptance that punctuate moderate Christianity lure in those outsiders, who have spent so long on the fringe, and beckon them into the safety of the flock. This is one of religion’s better outcomes, and once again occurs at a personal grass-roots level. But who is to say that such a person could not reform without ‘finding god’?

Creepy as hell

But I digress. It is not the religiosity or secularism of a particular group that I take issue with; it is the existence of an organized bureaucracy behind that religion. And more specifically, the potential for individuals or interest groups to co-opt and pervert that bureaucracy to further their own agendas. Just as the Nazi war machine allowed inherently evil deeds to be committed by a population who for the most part are not inherently evil themselves (the banality of evil), the scale and complexity of an organization such as the Catholic church, especially in pre-modern times, had the same effect. The Royal commission into institutionalised responses to sexual assault in Australia has recently cast some light into the Catholic Church’s inner-workings, and found that the sexual abuse of children by ordained ministers has been covered up by apparently moral members of the Church. These higher level members of the Church may not have committed pedophilia themselves, but by aggressively covering up and protecting their church they inevitably had to protect the priests responsible for the crimes, and so have facilitated the perpetuation of a most heinous and evil act, without direct involvement themselves.

Ignorance and violence

“There is far more violence in the Bible than in the Qur’an; the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.” – (Bistrich 2007)

Islam is not fundamentally violent, despite what many people either explicitly or implicitly believe. At least, it is no more so than Catholicism, or any other strict, dogmatic religion. The use of religion by extremists to justify the violent pursuit of their own goals is not unique to Islam, nor is it unique to the modern world. Intelligent and subversive people have been perverting the concept of divinity since the dawn of time. The levels of instability and violence being seen in much of the modern Islamic world need to be understood in a broader historical context if they are to be understood at all; if one wishes to compare two religions such as Islam and Christianity, as people often like to do, it requires us to look back at the entirety of each religion’s history.

When we do so, we see that Christianity has an incredibly violent past and has only ‘moderated’ in the past two or so centuries (which is to say that for the most part, Christians have stopped murdering each other at the genocidal rates of previous centuries). And upon closer examination, we see that the period in which this broad ‘moderation’ of Christianity took place also saw an unprecedented increase in education and the standard of living in the predominantly Christian West since the Industrial revolution. Before then, much like the men that today are blowing themselves up in Iraq, the average European for the majority of Christianity’s history was poor, rural and uneducated. It’s only in the last 150 years, with the industrial revolution in the West that the average Christian became more educated, richer, and urbanized.

In comparison, the world’s largest Muslim countries like Indonesia and Pakistan have spent those years instead toiling under, and finally throwing off the shackles of Western colonialism, and then trying to grow and prosper in a world where the political, military and cultural capital has been owned almost exclusively by Western, Christian elites. This has led to a continued imbalance in levels of education and quality of life between the Islamic and Christian worlds, and goes a long way to explain the levels of violence we see in the modern Islamic world. If you step back to a time when Europe’s population was largely uneducated and even the educated elites had some pretty messed up views (see: eugenics to justify slavery and colonialism), you’ll see Protestant and Catholics tearing each other apart in countless civil wars caused by sectarian tension, not to mention the long list of wars launched at the behest and with the blessing of the pope over the centuries (from the Crusades to the Spanish armada).

Today, just as it was then, it is far easier to radicalize a poor, uneducated rural person than it is a rich, educated urban one, as education and a good quality of life both tend to extinguish extremist tendencies (fat, middle-class Australians for example do not make good terrorists). Therefore to make a definitive statement about how violent a religion is without considering these and the myriad of other factors influencing the behaviour of Muslims around the world, is needless to say, a mug’s game.

They are all as bad as each other

To conclude, let me finish by reiterating that I do not try to argue that Islam is peaceful. In fact, it’s often quite the opposite. What I am arguing is that it is not fundamentally more violent than any other organized, dogmatic religion. By examining the external pressures the Islamic world has faced in the past two centuries, and comparing them with those that have influenced the West in the same period, we start to get an understanding that all organized religions have the potential, in the right (or in this case, wrong) circumstances, to be violent.

If they truly believe eternal salvation is on the line, people will eat each other. These ones look hungry…

People of the internet! In this age of information, we all have at our very fingertips more power to research and investigate an issue than at any other point in history. Use it.

The age of information is at risk of becoming the age of misinformation. You are active contributors and publishers to the online public sphere (if you post on Facebook, you are, in the eyes of the law at least, a publisher). There is nothing wrong, and whole lot of things right, with raising or promoting a cause which you are passionate about via social media. It has huge potential to allow us to reform and remake the world to be a better place. But if you do, you have a social responsibility and a moral obligation to ensure that the material you publish is accurate, true, and in the public interest.

Those with an agenda to push are getting better and better at manipulating the users of Facebook. Remember that while an organization itself may have a noble goal to end poverty, stamp out animal cruelty, or deport Justin Bieber, the social media manager they employ is there with the sole intent to get more likes at any cost. This is the one metric by which they justify their own existence. The use of graphic imagery as ‘click-bait’ is the most effective way to get likes, and so by tugging at your heart-strings, they use your compassion as a tool to further their own agenda.

Blurred Lines

It’s come to this

With a third of adults (in the US) getting their news from Facebook, the line between entertainment and news becomes dangerously blurred. When civil war in the Congo is squeezed in between a video of Miley Cyrus smearing the last of her dignity against the latex trousers of a douche-bag and a photo of your aunt’s #vegan #healthy #organic chai latte (#nofilter), it loses something of its relevance. Worse, it creates a perverse incentive which discourages the reader from digging deeper to get a better, more complete understanding of the issue, instead allowing a passing and often erroneous impression to act as a placeholder for actual comprehension.

We’re all guilty of it – we see a headline, and form an opinion without investigating to the extent to which we should, and we tuck that opinion away into our arsenal of dinner-party quips and coffee-house jibes, for use at a later date. We quietly build this repertoire of incomplete and partial knowledge so that it may called upon later in conversational jousts, lest we be revealed as the culturally illiterate phonies that we are. No one wants to feel irrelevant or uninformed, and no one has the time to be an expert of anything. Instead, we try to know a little bit of everything.

If Tony Abbott’s face causes you too much anguish, there’s a plugin for mozilla that turns (almost) all the photos of him into cute, furry kittens.

Tony Abbott is the best thing to happen to this country’s political atmosphere in a generation.

Did a part of you just curl up and die? Of course it did. You resent him and everything he stands for, and you believe that he is universally loathed. You can’t understand how the vitriolic posts that fill your Facebook wall each day, the March in March group you clicked ‘join’ on (and meant to go to) and that bloody budget, haven’t resulted in some kind of change around here. Where’s our Aussie-Spring? Where’s our brown revolution?

But when I say that Tony Abbott is the best thing to happen to this country’s political atmosphere in a generation, while it still doesn’t feel right, you have to look closely at the bits between Tony Abbott…Best…In a generation. He’s not the best thing to happen to this country in a generation. In fact he’s such an utter shit that he’s got everyone all riled up and marching and signing petitions, which is why he’s the best thing to happen to this country’s political atmosphere in a generation. Even I, who at 26 still find myself gripped by a crippling lethargy when faced with the banality and pettiness of modern Australian politics, yes even I, am beginning to stir.

I remember sitting in a lecture hall for a journalism class six or so years ago listening to an uninspiring state LNP politician speak eloquently and pointlessly; it was a faux press conference purely for the students’ benefit, to learn the journo’s trade – which is to say; learning to mindlessly follow press releases, moving like a flock from press conference to press conference and writing stale, lifeless copy. All while getting paid like a teacher (It’s just a figure of speech, relax).

He began to talk of the political apathy of generation Y, which really struck a chord with me, since at the time I was on easy street,and was therefore about as apathetic as you could be; a 19-year old university student, stoned out of my mind and getting paid by the government to do it.

But he did say something that stuck with me;

“All great political movements are born out of crises”

And in that context, looking at the time that has elapsed between then and now, one can see that there have been a series of political crises (relatively speaking, given Australia’s history of vanilla-politics), one after the other from Petey’s Pink bats to Julia and Kevin’s tiff, culminating in our current shitty state of affairs (dare I say crisis?) which takes the form of that deplorable excuse for a statesmen, Tony Abbott. And as the veil of apathy slips away from our collective vision, a generation is waking up and taking to the streets.

I’m still not quite there yet. But my continuing apathy does not stem from laziness. Well, not entirely from laziness. Nor does it stem from my continuously dodging the fiscal bullet (the budget didn’t touch me). It comes primarily from a cynicism based on my very basic grasp of the constitution and of our Westminster parliamentary system, and the subsequent realisation that unfortunately there isn’t much we can do to get rid of a Prime Minister if he has the support of the party, which this far from an election, he is unlikely to lose. And let’s face it, it would be way too labor to axe a leader mid-term, so it’s safe to say ‘ol T-biz has support of the party, at least for now.

So what options do we have? Everyone’s banging on about a double dissolution and calling for a vote of no confidence. Well, for that to work it would require a strong majority in either the house of representatives or the senate, neither of which Labor have. Even with the unwavering support of the Greens, they will struggle to block the bills to trigger a double dissolution (read about the requirements for the Governor General to call for a double-dissolution here)

For these reasons and many more, I believe that while the general increase in political activism is a good thing, it is misguided and somewhat lacking in direction. It’s as if we know what we want but we don’t understand how to get it, like a moth bouncing against a light bulb. Fundamental reforms require fundamental changes, and so it stands to reason that the march in March/May was a waste of time; we should be marching for a Republic.

Why? Well, firstly consider the Governor General. His (or until recently, her) role is largely ceremonial, he’s picked by the Prime Minister anyway, and yet he is referenced in almost every section of the constitution as serving ‘at her majesty’s pleasure’ as our head of state. He’s nothing more than a legislative rubber stamp, one who gets paid $350K per annum to cut ribbons and smile for the camera.

And sometimes he doesn’t even smile.

If Australia were to become a republic, it would require the re-drafting of the constitution (to get rid of all the ‘her majesty’s, and the G.G. as our head of state). Imagine if, now just go with me here, in this re-drafting we were to replace the Governor General with a popularly elected head-of-state, with limited, wartime executive power and limited veto power on legislation passed through the upper and lower house.

Now some might argue that this would lead to a US style, major-party-led political campaigning overkill, which everyone can agree, no one wants. But in a country where political apathy has been the norm for a generation, and a more inclusive and enthusiastic involvement by the electorate actually needs to be legislated (see: fines for not voting), I think this argument is a weak one.

And even this could be addressed, and if there was a way to limit the influence of the major parties on the presidential candidates, and then enshrine that limitation in the constitution, all the better. But even should it turn into a US style, major party dominated two-man contest, it would at the very least allow the constitution to more accurately reflect the way our country is run. That can’t be a bad thing. It’s only the blueprint for our nation after all.

Another good reason to support republicanism; Tony Abbott is a staunch monarchist, as are a lot of his idiotic cronies (interesting to note that while almost everything else that comes out of his mouth takes the form of slow, dripping diarrhea, Christopher Pyne has said publicly that he would support revisiting the republican issue). Malcolm Turnbull, the only Liberal minister I would shake hands with, is also a vocal republican.

Now finally, consider this; under our current constitution you, an Australian citizen, can’t become our head of state. This part doesn’t bother me with my shady past and my debilitating fear of responsibility, but you, you can’t have that, can you?

No you can’t. And that is why we need to reignite the republican movement with a vigorous, youth-led, grassroots initiative. Our generation is uniquely positioned to rewrite our nation’s history and change the way our democracy works, or doesn’t work as is more often the case. For the first time in a generation, people are angry, and taking that anger onto the streets to protest. We shouldn’t let that anger and energy be wasted, but instead look for ways in which to work within our constitutional framework to bring about the changes that we want, and which Australia needs.

Circumcision is a contentious topic for men. Which makes sense when you consider that every man is inevitably on one side of the debate or the other since infancy, and so has a hard time coming to terms with those facts (or otherwise) which clash with his own beliefs. Such considerations may force him to consider that maybe, just maybe, his parents made a terrible mistake all those years ago, and now his penis is less excellent than it could be. No… better to convince yourself otherwise; either that or resent your parents for the rest of your life.

The debate about circumcision is therefore inherently and unavoidably biased by those who engage in it. I am no exception. I’m proudly el naturale, and considering the fact that I’m about to shit all over the barbaric practice of Infantile Genital Mutilation (IGM) as I like to call it, but more commonly euphemized as ‘circumcision’, I find it necessary to lay bare these potential biases and influences.

Cognitive dissonance, for those of you who, unlike myself, don’t have an arts degree from a substandard regional university, is a term used to describe the conflict one experiences when holding two or more opposing beliefs or values at the same time (if you don’t care for my pedestrian paraphrasing, you can go to wikipedia and read all about it here)

If you do hold an arts degree or higher and/or read the above linked article, you’ll know that the only way to resolve ones cognitive dissonance is to change one of the opposing beliefs or values, or simply ignore it (the ‘head in the sand’ option. Trivializing is another option, but in this case, almost impossible)

Now in this context, for obvious reasons, it’s therefore extremely unlikely that even the most convincing rhetoric will change a circumcised male’s beliefs and values about the fact that his foreskin was severed at birth (by cruel men, under cold lights). As there is no way to ‘resolve’ the fact that his foreskin is irretrievably separated from him, he must instead convince himself of its merits, or simply ignore all facts that argue otherwise.

Still, a man’s gotta’ try, right? Because if you extend that logic further, it stands that this idiotic, obscure act of genital mutilation will be continued through the sheer hubris and blind pride of those men who, having been robbed of not only a part of their own penis themselves, but also the liberty to decide for themselves, should then visit this same sin upon their own innocent children.

The persistently high rate,still to this day, of institutionalized mutilation can be traced back to the Victorian Era, which spanned the years 1837-1901, when there existed an alarmingly common and unhealthy obsession amongst the outraged, middle aged upper-class types, with the idea of putting a stop to curious pubescent boys fiddling with themselves.

The ‘Heinous Sin of Self Pollution’, known to today’s youth as ‘fapping’, or more commonly as Masturbation.

The idea was that by snipping off the hood, the penis would both be desensitized, and would no longer offer the ‘natural lubrication’ of the foreskin’s gliding movement during masturbation, robbing would-be jerks of their natural ally in sin, the foreskin. (Uncircumcised males do not need lubricant to masturbate, instead being able to rely on that evolutionary home-run, the foreskin). Of course, they didn’t stop at this, coming up with some draconian and just plain creepy ‘anti-masturbation’ devices.

One iteration of the Victorian Era’s ‘Anti Masturbation devices’ which were all the rage for indignant prudes.

Seeking justifications other than simply trying stop to stop kids from fapping, before long a raft of diseases and afflictions had been linked to the foreskin including, but not at all limited to; madness, epilepsy, idiocy and cancer (Fleiss 1997). This led to a widespread adoption of the practice across the US in the post war years, and (thankfully) to a lesser extent here, in Australia. (It is interesting, if not unsurprising to note that there was, unfortunately, no correlative drop in idiocy, madness, cancer or epilepsy)

In more modern times, parents have for obvious reasons needed new and more believable, yet equally false reasons (such as decreased chances of contracting Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs), both of which I will thoroughly disprove shortly) to justify mutilating their children. But despite the utter falseness of these claims, convinced they have remained. As of 2007, 51% of newborn males in the USA were being subjected to circumcision (WHO 2007). Here in Australia the figures aren’t as complete, but it’s estimated that around 12.9% of newborns nationally are still getting the snip (it varies state to state, with Queensland the highest at just under 20%). Thankfully, public funding of the practice (which is to say institutionalised, state funded infant genital mutilation, no less) was removed from Medicare some time ago.

It is also worth noting that the earliest examples of male circumcision dates back to over 15,000 years ago, from back in a time when people where infinitely more ignorant than they are now. The foreskin on the other hand, well that only draws on billions of years of evolutionary improvement. Every part of the human anatomy is the product of a long string of gradual but inexorable progress, and the foreskin is no different. It seems like a slap in Darwin’s (and the collective evolutionary progress of humanity’s) face to suggest that we mere mortals can do better than evolution.

So with that said, let’s look at the arguments one by one (albeit from my own biased, yet biologically intact, perspective).

IT FEELS BETTER (for me)

The subjectivity of this statement makes it hard to properly address, but let’s take a shot anyway. For obvious reasons it’s practically impossible to say conclusively what feels ‘better’, as not only the term itself, but the experiences upon which it is based is subjective in the most pure sense of the word. Sex feels great for me, but who is to say it couldn’t feel better? Without a large sample population of people who transcend the circumcision divide (that is, people who have experienced sex as both circumcised and circumcised, a relatively rare experience one would expect), there is no real way to address this question from a quantitative perspective

The cold, hard science however tells us this – the foreskin removed during a typical circumcision contains, on average, 20,000-22,000 nerve endings (those little things that give us the joy of pleasure and/or the anguish of pain), and when you cut this off, well, they don’t just hop over to the scrotum that’s for sure (as awesome as that would be). Studies have shown a reported loss of sensation among circumcised men, and let’s not forget that the modern resurgence of circumcision, as mentioned earlier, traces it’s roots back to a concerted, Victorian effort to desensitize the penis and thus discourage masturbation.

IT FEELS BETTER (for her)

Women everywhere are lying to men everywhere. EVERYWHERE!

Again, this is a very subjective statement, and one that relies on subjective interpretation of ‘better’ (read through a couple of these submissions about ‘cut’ vs ‘un-cut’ on debate.org and you’ll get a feel for just how subjective. It’s interesting to note that, at the time of writing, the field was pretty evenly split, with a slight majority, 52% of women stating that they prefer circumcised men. Silly women).

Yet regardless of which side of the ‘foreskin-fence’ you are on, the overwhelming anecdotal evidence always seems to be in your favour. I’ve argued this countless times both with guys who got the snip, and guys who remain intact, and time and time again hear them say “It (meaning, circumcised or uncircumcised depending on the context) feels better for women”. Now, without taking a shot at their masculinity by calling every woman they have ever slept with a liar, it is perhaps worth noting that the methods used to gather this ‘data’ is in almost all cases unempirical, subjective and anecdotal; that is, haphazardly asking women, who are probably too nice to tell you either way anyway, whether your dick measures up to the (only god knows how many) other dicks she’s experienced, is probably pretty inconclusive. I’ll go even further; it should be blindingly obvious that the results will be skewed, and that as such this kind of ‘data’ needs to be unequivocally mopped up with Kleenex and thrown in the wastepaper bin.

Even results on user-generated submission sites, such as debate.org, should be taken with a grain of salt, as the methodology here is in many ways just as bad as that gathered by individuals (For instance there are no prerequisites for stating an opinion and taking part in the vote, prerequisites likes, say, having experienced both. It’s more of a opinionated free-for all than a systematic study)

So let’s try to look at it from a woman’s perspective, as best we can. A sexual educator with Your Tango, a women’s health, beauty, sex, and fifty-shades-of-grey-aficionado website, sums up her experience with the issue:

“As a sex educator, I have spoken with thousands of women about their experience of intercourse with circumcised and uncircumcised men, and a clear pattern has emerged. It seems that circumcision not only affects male pleasure, it changes how they make love. Circumcised men tend to penetrate much more vigorously, in the jackhammer style that is so familiar from our cultural depiction of intercourse. This style of penetration comes from a desperate search for more stimulation and the need to concentrate sensations on the tip of the penis.”

An example of a ‘vigorous’, ‘jackhammer style’, ‘desperate in the search for more stimulation’

She goes on to say, of the unmutilated/uncircumcised penis:

“Uncircumcised men, on the other hand, often penetrate with more finesse, using a slower rhythm and more of an undulating motion. The intact foreskin acts as a sheath that glides over the penis with every thrust, creating more pleasure and reducing the need to thrust with as much force to create sensation”

An example of ‘finesse’, as it ‘glides’ through the ‘undulating’ water

So to re-iterate, it’s hard to find objective and quantitative answers to such a subjective and qualitative issue, and for all intents and purposes the field is pretty evenly split.

But at the end of the day, is this even an argument? I mean, as long as I get off, who cares about her? Amirite?

I CAN’T GET AIDS

You can, and probably will, with that attitude

The argument that circumcised men enjoy a lower chance of contracting STIs has been proven to be circumstantial at best, and damaging to public health outcomes at worst. Imagine a generation of young men, arrogant and proud, prodding their dicks into every available orifice with impunity, fearless in the knowledge that early in their life, those who cared for them made a wise and prudent decision which has and will protect them forever against that bane to sexual freedom and promiscuity, the STI.

OK, so no one really thinks circumcision is AIDS-proof, but even if only a minimal level of protection from circumcision is merely implied, this could lead to a more lax approach to sexual health and contraception, which, needless to say, is probably a bad thing.

The only situation in which this argument has any possible credence is in places like sub-saharan Africa, where studies have shown a correlation between high rates of circumcision and lower rates of HIV/AIDs infection rates, in some cases reducing the chance of contracting HIV by 50% (Auvert 2005, 2006). These studies, while obviously very exciting to the world’s circumcised community (you mean I only have to wear a condom half the time now???), hold little relevance in the West, where access to contraception is almost universal, and instead of the existential problems faced by those living on or below the poverty line, we spend our time writing blogs about first-world problems like “Would I be so lonely if my cock was intact?”.

So just to be clear, circumcision does not offer any significant advantage in terms of STIs, unless you happen to be living on less than $2 a day in West-Africa, or you simply don’t give a fuck.

IT’S CLEANER

Cheddar, or Swiss?

This argument takes a couple of different approaches to motivate parents to mutilate their children, which include:

Keeping a baby’s uncircumcised penis clean is difficult, and young boys will not keep theirs clean, leading to infections

This is simply not true. Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D. (2011) says “in babies, the foreskin is completely fused to the head of the penis. You cannot and should not retract it to clean it, as this would cause the child pain, and is akin to trying to clean the inside of a baby girl’s vagina”. What’s more, she states that “It is harder to keep circumcised baby’s penis clean because you have to carefully clean around the wound, make sure no feces got into the wound, and apply ointment”.

Of her own experiences, Narvaez says that as the boys grow up “there is nothing special that the parents need to do. Most little boys have absolutely no problem playing with their penises in the shower or anywhere else! It was harder to teach my boys to wash their hair than it was to care for their penises” (Narvaez 2011)

Uncircumcised penises get smelly smegma.

Smegma is produced in both men and women, and is made up primarily of sebum, a natural lubricant, and a sprinkling of skin cells for good measure. When this mixture is left uncleaned for a long period of time, it thickens into that lovely dick-cheese known as smegma.

Again, in the modern Western context, where only a small minority of people (which is to say, mongrels) bathe infrequently, this argument is irrelevant. (If you’ve gotten to the point of smelling such a person’s smegma, there’s no hope for you anyway, so just give up now).

Firstly, this myth is based on a flawed study from the ‘80s (a heady time to be sure), which failed to take into account a whole range of qualifying variables, such as whether the subjects were breast-fed (which provides natural protection against UTIs), or whether the children had been born prematurely (which increases the risk of UTIs). What’s more, UTIs are somewhat uncommon and not a very serious problem, requiring a short course of antibiotic. So mutilating your children’s genitals on these grounds, considering the counter-arguments against it, seems to me like just a bit of an overkill.

IN CONCLUSION

Circumcision is out-dated, useless at best, and harmful at worst. Entrenched ignorance have perpetuated what is, if viewed objectively and in full view of the facts, a barbaric custom long since bereft of medical or scientific justification, and have led to perpetuating situation whereby by those who, having not being given the choice themselves, then rob their own children of the liberty to decide on the shape their penis should take.

More alarming than any of the evidence against circumcision is the fact that parents feel the right to make this decision for their children, long before said child has the ability to make his own mind up and long before he has weighed up the pro’s and cons. Because even if one day down the track someone does find some empirical, indisputable proof that circumcision is for the best, I can always pop into day surgery and, with about a week of healing, enjoy those benefits.

Reverse this scenario, and it’s pretty hard for circumcised guys to say the same.